Friday, May 14, 2010

wounds 332.wou.03 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

On December 2, 1988 Benazir Bhutto was sworn in as Prime Minister of Pakistan, becoming the first woman to head the government of an Islamic State. In the preceding decade of political struggle, Ms. Bhutto was arrested on numerous occasions; in all she spent nearly 6 years either in prison or under detention for her dedicated leadership of the then opposition Pakistan Peoples Party. Throughout the years in opposition, she pledged to transform Pakistani society by focusing attention on programs for health, social welfare and education for the underprivileged. Since assuming the office of Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto has emphasized the need to heal past wounds and to put an end to the divisions in Pakistani society - including reducing discrimination between men and women. Ms. Bhutto has launched a nationwide program of health and education reform. Benazir Bhutto was born in Karachi in 1953. After completing her early education in Pakistan, she attended Radcliffe College and Oxford University. As well as obtaining a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, she also completed a course in International Law and Diplomacy at Oxford. Ms. Bhutto is the author of "Foreign Policy in Perspective" (1978) and her autobiography, "Daughter of Destiny" (1989). She received the Bruno Kreisky Award for Human Rights in 1988 and the Honorary Phi Beta Kappa Award from Radcliffe in 1989. Benazir Bhutto is a woman of courage and conviction and we are proud to acknowledge her with the International Leadership Award.

Monday, May 10, 2010

exercises 554.exe.003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

We had plans, and there were exercises on how to act if the Egyptians crossed the Canal, but these plans always began from our that our reserve army would be deployed before the war broke out. In fact, there were reactions to Egyptian or Syrian attacks to which we could reply with the regular army. What happened on the battlefield of the southern command was that, according to the exercises, our strongholds, surrounded by the Egyptian army which had crossed, called for help, and only a few tank platoons came to their rescue. The situation was good for small operations on the part of the Egyptians, but not for a real attack. Most of the tank platoons managed to reach the Canal, but they didn't know what they were supposed to do there; they did not arrive in a concentrated force, but piecemeal, to different areas. They shot a bit, they evacuated the casualties, and then came back again. That's how they arrived: two, three tanks at a time. They began just sinking to the ground... and it became dark, and the Egyptians continued to cross. So that the strategy was a wrong strategy. Instead of evacuating the strongholds and retreat, the tanks ran forward, trying to prevent the crossing, but they acted in very small numbers, while the Egyptians had tens of thousands of soldiers.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

downstairs 433.dow.003003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Davis, born July 9, 1964, was 5-foot-8 and 145 pounds, with brown hair, hazel eyes, a scruffy mustache and cleft turtle chin. He had bulging prison muscles and a collection of bad jailhouse tattoos on his wrist, ankle, buttocks, chest and back.

In prison and just after, he wore his hair in an outdated mullet style — short bangs and a cascade of hair down his back. (He later cut it off.)

He was so obviously an ex-con that he might as well have had his prison I.D. number stamped on his forehead.

But he considered himself a player, and he apparently hit on nearly every woman he met.

His downstairs neighbor, Carol Boydston, told reporters that he was a tireless seducer.

"He tried to get me up there, but I never wanted to get involved with him," she told KMBC-TV in Kansas City. "I thought he was just a big flirt."

"He seemed like a real nice guy," she told the Independence Examiner, although "he did have a strange side."

For example, Boydston said, Davis made sure she knew every time he had a woman in his apartment. He often tried to give her the details of his sexual conquests, including the ages of female guests — some as young as 18.

"He bragged he still had it," she said.

What he didn't explain is that most of the women who visited his busy bed were meth addicts who were lured there in a sex-for-drugs exchange.

Friday, April 16, 2010

return 662.ret.002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

One eye witnesses to the robbery of Serabit el Khadem was a private soldier named Ido Dissentchik. Ido�s father was the editor of Ma�ariv, a prominent Israeli daily newspaper (Dissentchik 1981:12-13, quoted by Slater 1991:284).� By sheer chance, Ido�s unit happened to be in reserve duty in Abu Rudeis in Sinai in July 1969. The unit was ordered to provide protection for defense minister Dayan at Serabit el Khadem (misspelled in Slater 1991:284). Arriving there, they found �Dayan and his friend for archaeological matters [not named] busy on a tour. It was not a regular military tour, but an archaeological one. The pilots... took aboard the helicopter the treasured antiquities that Dayan desired�. They watched in amazement, says Ido, and on the way back one of his unit suddenly said: �We provided security for a crime. Just like in the movies: the robbers inside the bank, the covering men outside. We are accessories to a crime�.� The �simple soldiers� realized the nature of what they saw, whereas the eyes of the generals were blinded by greed. Dissentchnik (1981:12-13) continues to tell how he argued with his father, who refused to publish any of this in his newspaper, saying: �What you tell does not surprise me. No story about Moshe Dayan will surprise me. He�s capable of any bad deed. But we will not write such things about him. Moshe Dayan must be accepted as he is, with the good and the bad in him... because we need him. When D day comes, he is our hope and our savior�. In response to which Ido asked, �regardless of price�? The answer of his father was unequivocal and quite typical of the period, �there is no price for the independence and safety of a nation.�� After the 1973 war, the father admits his mistake, and remarks that he knows many more stories about Dayan, mostly about money, but he would still not publish them, because �after all these years, it will be hypocritical on my part.�

Another direct and credible eyewitness was Uri Yarom, who happened to be the helicopter pilot who carried Dayan�s looted finds. In his autobiography, Yarom (2001:170-173) tells about the �Steiner operation� in 1956- after the German word Stein (stone). Dayan is explicitly mentioned as the one responsible for this �operation�, in which he used the new military vehicle- the helicopter- to haul the heavy antiquities. Yarom landed at Abu Rudeis where, �over a picnic-lunch, the commander of the camp described our next mission: to reach to the ruins of Serabit el Khadem... and carry a load of stones of archaeological-historical value, already marked by Shmaryah Gutman, and to land them at Abu Rudeis. The booty [sic, shalal in Hebrew- R.K.] will be loaded on a Dacota plane [at Abu Rudeis], to be taken to Israel� (Yarom 1971:171).� The looting took place on 27.11.56; Yekutiel Adam and Uzi Narkis, two high-ranking officers of the IDF, were present in the helicopter. They made three rounds at least, taking an inscribed stele, a large obelisk, and �a few more pieces�. Some 20 soldiers helped to transfer the �booty� to a plane going home, in which they themselves hoped to get a lift for a leave. According to Yarom, one stele with Hathor�s face was damaged by a careless driver when loaded on a military truck. Most of the stones, writes Yarom, reached the Hebrew University collection, but at least one �found its way to the private collection of Dayan (Yarom 2001:173). A photo of an obelisk being hauled by the helicopter from the site appears in the book.

Rumors (which I could not verify) explain that when Dayan was handed the query about this in the Knesset in 1971, he did make his homework. He took the stele out of his house shortly before the scheduled date of discussion. Then he testified in the Knesset that he does not have any stele from Serabit el Kahdem in his house at the moment.� This, in his eyes, made him truthful.�

Professor Ze�ev Meshel of Tel Aviv University, in an interview made on 15.1.02, recalls that he saw stelea from Serabit el Khadem in the IDAM stores in Shlomo Hamelekh street in Jerusalem. A former IDAM worker, Shimon Nahmani, showed them wrapped in cloth inside a room closed to the public. He told Meshel that the IDAM never asked for these stelea, and that Dayan brought them suddenly in 1956 without warning. They did not know what to do with them. I have heard similar versions of this same story from other archaeologists, who asked to remain anonymous. According to them, after the peace treaty with Egypt was signed, the IDAM had to work hard in order to persuade the air force to return these very heavy antiquities to Sinai.

The case of Serabit el-Khadem demonstrates the myth cultivated by Dayan, and especially by his daughter Yael, that he never lied and did everything openly, with knowledge and even consent of Israel�s authorities, hence he was not a despised �burglar at night�. Those who advocate this myth seem to confuse two things. The style of bad deeds, that is, whether they are made in broad daylight or under cover of darkness, cannot vindicate the deeds themselves. Many details remain enigmatic. Shmaryah Gutman is well known as a capable archaeologist and excavator of Gamla in the Golan Heights, and perhaps his name was involved by mistake. Yet, many knew and participated in the looting. They also knew that Dayan�s answers in the Knesset were not truthful.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

checked 992.che.002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The next day, three depressions 1.5 inches deep and 7 inches in diameter were found where the object had been sighted on the ground. The following night (29 Dec 80) the area was checked for radiation. Beta/gamma readings of 0.1 milliroentgens were recorded with peak readings in the three depressions and near the center of the triangle formed by the depressions. A nearby tree had moderate (0.05–0.07) readings on the side of the tree toward the depressions.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

sense 22.sen.001001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Because of the early ridicule I endured, I had no support system. There was no one with whom I could talk and no one I would trust to listen. I felt very alone, but learned to go on with my life. I did occasionally wonder about things and I think on some level I always knew something was going on. I would catch myself thinking about an odd mark or unexplainable bruise, and deciding, “Oh, they must have been here last night.” It took me years to wonder who “they” were. I accepted my odd fears and worked to overcome them. I didn’t question where they came from. There were times I would awaken with my nightclothes on backwards, inside out, or both. I became obsessed with checking them to make sure they were on correctly at bedtime, which they nearly always were. In the morning, I would be at a loss to explain how they had turned or flipped. Every once in a while, I would wake up with nothing on and find my night clothes in another room. This was extremely hard to explain, but I managed to simply shrug it off and not think too deeply about it. Occasionally, I would see some cartoon character or drawing of something with large eyes. They made me uncomfortable, but I would just avoid them. I didn’t like to spend the night at anyone else’s house because I felt a vague sense of guilt that I would somehow endanger them. I kept to myself for many years.

Everything changed in my 20’s when I accidentally picked up a book on alien abductions. The book was Communion by Whitley Strieber. I have been an avid science fiction reader my entire life, but always stayed well clear of UFO and abduction topics. I had never read any other books by this author, and didn’t have any idea what this particular book was about. I bought the book as part of a package for joining a book club and without thinking picked Communion. When it arrived, I put it aside and ignored it for months. The cover bothered me, so I turned it over and put it under a stack of other books. Even though I hadn’t read a word in it yet, I didn’t like the book. It disturbed me. Ultimately, I ran out of other reading material and picked it up again. As I began to read, I realized that I was recognizing more and more of the material. I read it from cover to cover in a few hours, never putting it down once I began. No other book has ever affected me as that one did, before or since. Quite literally, my world fell apart that day.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

dropped 44.dro.002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The charges against Albright shifted and changed as the prosecutors prepared for trial. First the three murders were attributed to him, and then the unsolved 1988 stabbing murder of an Oak Cliff-area prostitute, based on several strands of hair found on her that were consistent with Albright's (although her eyes had not been removed). Then Albright came up with an alibi for that one — he was out of town — so that charge was dropped. Given the type of evidence available, a grand jury reduced the capital murder charges to murder, so the death penalty was off the table, and eventually the district attorney's office settled on prosecuting Albright for only one murder, Shirley Williams, without explaining why they were doing so.

The judge said that, should they lose, they could not reinstate the other charges for later cases. It wouldn't matter. The Williams case was their strongest one, and if they lost that, they would surely lose the others, too. The judge knocked down the bond to $750,000, but Albright could not afford that any more than the original $3 million, so he remained in prison.

Thus, when his trial date was finally set for December 2, 1991, Albright faced prosecution for the murder of Shirley Williams, which carried a sentence of life in prison. However, the court ruled that the prosecution could bring in the other cases, based on the linkage. Once the legal issues were worked out, the trial, initially delayed, began.